Finance Seminar Tanja Kirmse
This paper examine the contractual evolution of poison pill design, focusing on declining ownership triggers, acting-in-concert provisions, and synthetic equity clauses that tailor pills to defend against shareholder activism.
Using novel data on hedge fund access to SEC filings as a proxy for intervention threats, the study shows that firms facing activist pressure are more likely to adopt anti-activist pills.
Finally, the results indicate that relative to comparable firms under activist scrutiny, pill adopters experience fewer interventions and are less likely to pursue activist-driven policies